Copyright Limitations, Exceptions, and Copyright’s Innovation Policy Fred von Lohmann. Senior Copyright Counsel at Google
Copyright is not any more about creativity, but also about innovation. That is why we are increasingly seen exceptions or special treatments to initiatives like search engines, space shifting, ephemeral copies, remix culture, etc.
The problem is that we usually have to ask for permission first, and then innovate later, which undeniably hinders innovation, as we cannot always predict what is the kind of “permission” that is going to be needed. A first example is indexing, the way sound recognition works (as Shazam does), etc. all rely on making copies of existing works so that indexing or comparison is made possible. Of course, these are not copies that are going to be used themselves, but as a tool, as means to achieve other goals. How does copyright exactly fit in here? A second example is related to cloud computing.
Courts, safe harbours and fair use are ways to provide some flexibility for experimentation and innovation. Article 5, the adaptation right and the 3 step test have been tools that have worked quite well so far. But we’d rather revise the copyright directive to accommodate it to present times.
Discussion
Javier de la Cueva: we usually speak about books or movies or music when we speak about intellectual property, but I believe that the real revolution in creativity is coming from code. Von Lohman: indeed, a good example of that is all the programmers coding Java that, somehow, they are working for Oracle.
Copyserfs and the Stationers’ Company 2.0: How and why copyright law is evolving away from the protection of authors and toward the protection of intermediaries Greg Lastowka Professor of Law, Rutgers University, USA. Author of Virtual Justice (Yale University Press, 2010)
There is a $6 Bn trade on virtual worlds. Most of it relies on copyright law: from the creation of one’s identity to the very same content that is on the virtual platform. And whose property is a user designed avatar? Whose property are the structures that users create on virtual worlds?
In many ways, users are like peasants that contribute to the wealth of the virtual territory, but the territory is not theirs. The value of virtual platforms is created by users establishing community, not by gatekeepers.
On a pre-user-generated content (UGC) world, a professional created a product, a professional distributed the product, and a user consumed the product in exchange for a payment. In a UGC world, the user also produces, while most of the time, the professionals just maintain the platform where both creation and distribution happens.
Platforms compete to entice popular creativity; users are not paid to produce content; users pay platform to view user-generated content by subscribing to services or “pay” by viewing advertisements.
Critics (Lanier, Keen, etc.): UGC represents a coarser, cheaper culture without information gatekeepers; UGC is only created in limited genres; a large amount of UGC is poor quality; successful UGC creators would jump to join the ranks of content professionals; this is not making money; UGC creators rely on professional firms for tools, distribution and inspiration.
Boosters (Benkler, Jenkins, Shirky, etc.): UGC is more democratic; UGC allosw audiences to “speak back”; UGC is more collaborative.
Prior to 1709, there was a monopoly to the distribution of products. Thus, booksellers had a monopoly on books: they distributed the authors’ books to book purchasers, got money in exchange and transferred a part of it back to the authors. With the Statute of Anne, copyright was granted to authors so that there was competition amongst booksellers. With user-generated content, it is not clear who the author is, who the “bookseller” and who the end book purchaser. So, what is to be done with copyright?
The economic rationale of copyright was, with regard to certain artistic forms, specific to certain technologies of distribution.
Today, certain forms of artistic creativity are actually superabundant and the rationale of copyright does not apply anymore.
There is an added problem, as Marvel Enters. vs. NCSoft Corp shows: the latter provided the users to create their own superhero costumes, which somehow allowed this users to (re)create Marvel superheros’ costumes, thus infringing copyright. Who’s liable for that? Another example is MDY Indus. vs. Blizzard Entertainment. MYD created a software bot that enabled World of Warcraft users to play their characters for them, on an unattended way. Yet another example, Turnitin was sued for copyright infringement as it used students’ papers to run their business. In Facebook, Inc. v. Power Ventures, Inc. claiming that Power Ventures was copying Facebook data for their own purposes.
Some concluding remarks:
UGC platforms are privately-owned and privately-policed spaces /chattels.
If content is not portable the primary economic returns of UGC are obtained by the platform owner, not the author.
The law is evolving away from protecting the creator to protecting the distributor/owner of intellectual property rights.
But we should not kill the tools, the ways to recognize the value of UGC, we have to afford greater latitude for remix.
We should protect the creator interests.
Discussion
Marsden: if many of these creations are personal, can we look at it as personal data and from a privacy point of view? Lastowka: Yes, there is an obvious intersection between privacy and property UGC.
Notes from the seminar for the Summer School 2012 of the School of Social and Urban Politics, Government and Public Policy Institute, Barcelona, 3 July 2012.
These are the random notes I took during the #2 Debate on Democracy and Political Community: representation, participation and intermediation, chaired by Fernando Pindado. It started with Quim Brugué, from whom I took many and interesting notes, and then it was my turn to present — you will only find my slides, which, on the other hand, are quite self-explanatory. At the end a very rich debate took place, and I only took some general ideas as I concentrated fully on it.
Between representation and participation: social and political intermediations Quim Brugué (IGOP)
In politics, there usually is an intermediary, a third party that mediates in negotiations, in conflicts. The commons can be thus seen as a “new” way to get rid of intermediaries, and let the public thing to be ruled in an alternative way. But, is this possible? Can we get rid of mediators?
Ben Said, in Elogio de la política profana, says: if politics is the art of mediation, what is left when we have no politics? If we have no politics, we do have to come up with another way of organising democracies. But participation will not just suffice.
Without intermediaries, micro- and local experiences might work perfectly, but is that scalable to the macro level?
What has the past taught us?
Democracy is the exception. Democracy has only been the norm during a few hundred of years: in the Vth century b.C. during the classical democracy in Ancient Greece, and in the last 200 years of the modern democracy since the Constitution of Philadelphia in 1787. The former one is a democracy without intermediators, and the latter a democracy full of intermediators.
Democracy in Athens was fully against representation: no one was elected to represent anyone as this was non-democratic. Only powerful people could ask to be elected as a representative, thus there was a bias towards power. Representatives were merely executive powers that did what the assembly commanded, and were usually chosen by random methods.
There were no political parties, and there was no interpretation of facts or ideological positioning. Democracy was totally direct and opinion shaping happened during assemblies that used to deliberate for hours. They had slaves that worked for them, which made it easier to participate in politics: only citizens could participate. The citizen acted not on selfishness, but thinking on the common benefit. Aristotle said that a citizen was someone that knew how to rule and how to be ruled upon.
Greek democracy was a strong democracy: it believed that there was a better future if people worked together and had common goals or projects.
Modern or liberal democracies, on the contrary, is a highly intermediated democracy. It is based on a strong non-confidence on one’s peers to rule and be ruled. Liberal democracies are built to protect property and the mass is seen with fear and little capable to deal with public issues. The US Constitution builds a dense mesh of intermediators to separate people from power. Citizens can just glance up power in a blurry image.
The concept of citizenship in liberal democracies is a very individualistic one: people look for themselves and not for the common good, the citizen is absolutely selfish, whenever we become dreamers in common, we are becoming the dictators’ of the others’ dreams. The citizen is more a customer of the State rather than a citizen that takes part of it.
Greek democracy ended up as total failure. Assemblies were crowded out by specialists (demagogues, sophists) that mastered the art of dialogue. But they had not any responsibility on what was decided in the Assembly. Thus, dialogue was killed (and Socrates too…), and worst decisions were taken.
And liberal democracies are increasingly being seen as a total failure too. It is becoming unacceptable for the citizen to be totally alienated from power and decision-making.
Conclusions?
We need intermediation, but we need to bring power closer to the citizen. There is a need for politics. But politics must keep a certain distance from the citizen too, to avoid populism, to try and be objective, to be able to provide answers.
Intermediation is also about deception: neither for you nor for me. It is about finding a middle point. And politics also needs authority, enforcement.
We need politics. But, surely, we also need another kind of politics. One that is strongly based in confidence, and confidence that goes both ways: from the State/politician to the citizen and from the citizen to the representative.
And if the citizenry does want to move towards a more direct democracy (like in Athens) is it absolutely necessary that it has to abandon the position of being a customer, and act more like a citizen, an engaged one that participates eagerly in politics.
Do we need political intermediaries in a Network Society? Ismael Peña-López (UOC)
Q: what networks? physical vs. “real” –> the example of stay at home mums, crafting communities, rare diseases, etc. which work online and offline.
Guillermo: what about the commons? –> the processes as part of the common wealth
Óscar Rebollo: less knowledge and more interests –> informed voting.
Óscar Rebollo: engagement vs. slacktivism? –> explicitation of interests, aggregation of interests
Óscar Rebollo: technology is not neutral. Are there hidden interests behind technology?Who controls the technology? What is the price for using that much technology?
Q: do we need a new concept of citizen? –> put more responsibility in the citizen; and we do need a new concept of polititian, from maximizing votes to maximizing wellbeing.
Brugué: we are self-satistied of our own digital experiences, while the world keeps getting worse and we remain indifferent to how rulers perform poorly.
Brugué: there is huge intermediation, and it’s called the Network: it is less transparent, less controlled, less engaging into reflection.
Ana: Pedro Ibarra speaks about democracia relacional, to create spaces of contact, of meeting, so that improbable people meet in improbable places and achieve agreement.
Ismael Peña-López: we have to take the habits of:
Being digital.
Being a citizen, and that an expert can be found anywhere.
Being a politician (and a citizen and digital). To “infect” institutions, to turn politicians into “indignants”.
Presentació Prezi:
Peña-López, I. (2012). Calen els intermediadors polítics en una societat xarxa?. Seminari per l’Escola d’Estiu 2012 a l’Escola de Polítiques Socials i Urbanes, Institut de Govern i Polítiques Públiques, 3 de juliol de 2012.
Presentació Prezi:
Peña-López, I. (2012). Calen els intermediadors polítics en una societat xarxa?. Seminari per l’Escola d’Estiu 2012 a l’Escola de Polítiques Socials i Urbanes, Institut de Govern i Polítiques Públiques, 3 de juliol de 2012.
Some months ago, professor in Social Pedagogy Xavier Úcar approached Francesc Balagué and I and told us he was very worried: after many years working in the field of community action, the Internet had come and changed every definition we had on what a community was, and changed every definition we had on what interaction (or action) was too. He had just found out that community action might be lagging behind the pace of times. And he invited us to write a book on the new communities and how did they interact on the net, so that he and his colleagues could use it to catch up with new scenario after the digital revolution.
An appealing invitation as it was, we had grounded reasons not to accept it: one of us is a pedagogue specialised in instructional technology and the other one an economist specialised in the impact of ICTs and development. Thus, we knew almost nothing about community action, and only had a chaotic approach to new expressions of communities working together in the most different types of ways and goals. That is precisely the point, stated professor Úcar.
Hence the heterodoxy of the inner structure of the book that has just seen the light. Acción comunitaria en la red (Community action in the net) is neither a book on community action nor a book with very clear ideas. It is, but, a book that invites the reader to think, to elaborate their own conclusions, and to find out which and whether these conclusions can be applied and how to their own personal or professional cases.
The full book has been written by 15 authors and presents 8 case studies that depict and analyse how a specific community used the Internet and its different tools and platforms to share information, communicate amongst them, organize themselves and coordinate actions in order to achieve their particular goals. The structure of the chapters analysing the cases was totally free, but some relevant questions had to be answered somehow:
What were the history, motivations, goals of the community?
What led the community to use the Internet? How was the community articulated digitally? what provided the Internet that could not be found offline?
How was the process of adoption of digital technologies, what tools and why?
What happened to the sense of membership, identity, participation?
What was the role of the mediator, facilitator, leader and how does it compare with an offline leadership?
Is self-regulation possible? How was conflict handled?
How is digital knowledge, experiences and learning “brought back” to the offline daily life and put into practice?
The cases are preceded by two introductory chapters, a first one on the social web and virtual participation, and a second on digital skills, as we thought some common background would help the reader to better understand some digital practices (and jargon). The book closes with what we, both authors, learnt during the preparation of the book and from reading other people’s chapters. This concluding chapter can be used too as a guideline for the preceding cases.
APTIC. A social networking site for relativos of boys and girls with chronic diseases and conditions. Manuel Armayones, Beni Gómez Zúñiga, Eulàlia Hernández, Noemí Guillamón.
School building: new communities. Berta Baquer, Beatriu Busquets.
There is a lot of people to be thankful to for making the book possible.
The first one is Xavier Úcar. I have only seldom been granted such a degree of total confidence and trust, not only in my work but in myself as a professional. He was supportive and provided guidance to two ignorants in the field. He totally gave us a blank cheque and one of my deepest fears during the whole process was — and still is — to have been able to pay him back with a quality book. I really hope it has been so.
The authors of the case studies were just great. Some of us did not know each other and I can count up to three people which I still have to meet personally (i.e. offline). They also trusted in us and gave away a valuable knowledge and work that money won’t pay. Many of them won’t even make much use of adding a line on their CVs for having written a book chapter. I guess this is part of this sense of new communities that the whole book is talking about.
My gratitude (but also apologies) to Antoni Garcia Porta and Sara Cardona at Editorial Graó. I am fully aware that we made them suffer: we succeeded in transferring some of our chaotic lives to them when they had not asked to. Being an editor today must be both a thrilling and a difficult challenge. We all gave away time in the making of the book but the published they represent invested money too, and that is something that we quickly forget these days.
Last, but absolutely not least, it has been a real pleasure working with Francesc. I think we only met once during the whole process: when Xavier invited us to coordinate the book. Francesc then packed and went around the world for 14 months. Luckily he took his laptop and would connect every now and then. Our e-mail archive and Google Documents can testify that almost everything is possible if there is the will to do it.
Communications session on Virtual platforms and learning assessment. Chairs: Irene Rovira, School of Law and Political Science, UOC
Self-assessment, co-assessment and assessment of learnings Esther Carrizosa Prieto, Universidad Pablo de Olavide; & José Ignacio Gallardo Ballestero, IES «V Centenario» de Sevilla.
Assessment is made by using rubrics. There are assignments and online debates. But there were some limits in this approach. To overcome these limits, self-assessment and co-assessment methods were set up to complement the traditional assessment performed by the teacher.
Google Forms were used to support these methodologies. Google Forms are free, easy, enables collaborative learning, can be linked or embedded anywhere or be sent through e-mail. A very interesting feature of Google Forms is that they produce, in real time, spreadsheets and reports that show the data that the form has been fed with.
Continuous assessment and grading: difficulties and a proposal for a strategy to overcome them. Ignasi Beltran De Heredia, School of Law and Political Science, UOC.
The transition to the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) has, in general terms, increased the workload in what is related to grading. There is a triple problem to be solved: identifying the skill to be evaluated, designing an assignment that fits into the purpose of acquiring that skill, and assessing the level of acquisition of that skill. Indeed, maintaining coherence and consistency is increasingly difficult when what is assessed is not objective contents but somewhat more subjective levels of acquisition of a specific skill.
A first step to take is designing assignments that can be properly graded. This will depend on the skills and, of course, the number of students per classroom/subject/teacher.
Second, to elaborate a proposal for a solution. This serves a double purpose: provide guidance to the student once the assignment has been delivered, and to provide guidance to the teacher to be able to grade with more consistency, as the criteria of assessment are public and explicit.
In the case where there are many teachers for the same subject, it is interesting to compare the grading performance of the different teachers, so that everyone can situate themselves within the general trend of the group. Questionnaires can help in bringing objectivity to the issue of grading, but they also are very limited for assessing some specific skills (e.g. teamwork).
A proposal for the learning of legal terminology by online students: the use of Hot Potatoes Antonio Bueno Armijo & Nuria Magaldi Mendaña, Universidad de Córdoba.
It is very important to distinguish between informal and formal/professional environments when talking about legal issues. In a professional environment, legal terminology does matter, thus why the stress in learning the proper technology to be used in each different case. How can this terminology be learnt and applied? Does this change depending on the learning environment (offline vs. oline)?
Reading legal documents and writing assignments are two methodologies that work for both scenarios. But oral presentations (e.g. lectures, presentations) are also ways to learn how a specific terminology can be applied and is not an option in online learning. What could a valid alternative be?
Hot potatoes is a popular tool used in the field of language teaching. It is an authorware that is really easy to use, featuring several templates for different exercises and the software builds five different kinds of exercise: crosswords, fill in the gaps, word pairing, word sorting, and short questionnaires.
Besides daily learning, the software is a perfect match for the last weeks of the course, to review past contents, to summarize or synthesise the most important subjects covered, etc.
Initially, the students have shown reluctance to use the software, but after a first trial, a high proportion uses the tool until they succeed in all the exercises. A drawback, tough, is that once all the exercises have been correctly solved, the students rarely come back to the tool to revisit or review again the same topics.
Learning in negotiation, mediation and arbitration techniques in the Practicum. Virtual Moot and mock trials in online dispute resolution (ODR) processes.
The goals of this subject is the acquisition of specific skills in the field of negotiation, mediation and arbitration.
The students participate in a competition in groups, each one representing a different role in the moot court. The competition is about performing an online dispute resolution. A virtual courthouse was created based on a wiki (Wikispaces). The process is split in different phases, in which the teachers provide the students (the groups) the documents of the simulation.
For the students to be able to discuss and work within the teams, two tools were also set up: a synchronous one, a chat; and an asynchronous one, based on “projects” in the space of the wiki. The synchronous one of course put some constraints to the students that have time issues, but the acceptance of the tool was very high. On the other hand, the asynchronous tool was less used, but much more intensively. Thus, a first conclusion is that the combination of chat+wiki was certainly a good one.
An important key to success was engagement, both from students and teachers. A second one, being familiar with the use of certain technologies. In this sense, scheduling some days/weeks of tech training before the beginning of the activity is a must.
Strategies to provide feedback in continuous assessment Ana María Delgado García, School of Law and Political Science, UOC; Rafael Oliver Cuello, Universitat Pompeu Fabra; & Irene Rovira Ferrer, School of Law and Political Science, UOC.
The goal of the project is to provide valuable feedback to the students once their assignments have been graded. Feedback helps to detect needs of the students and provides guidance to them in order to improve their performance.
Characteristics of good feedback:
Frequent or regular.
Immediate.
Thorough, detailed, clear.
Practical.
Generalized.
Feedback can be provided either individually — personalized — or grupally — generic, pointing at the global issues.
The students evaluated very positively the experience with feedback. It was also tested that academic performance was increased due to feedback.
Share:
3rd Conference on Law Education and Information and Communication Technologies (2012)
Communications session on Tools for collaborative work. Chairs: Ignasi Beltran de Heredia, School of Law and Political Science, UOC
Microblogging in the classroom. From information to participation Ismael Peña-López & Agustí Cerrillo-Martínez, School of Law and Political Science, UOC
The blog and the wiki as tools to train teamworking skills Patricia Escribano Tortajada, Manuel Vial Dumas & Ana María Roncal Oloriz, School of Law and Political Science, UOC.
This is an experience that took place in the subject of Negotiation and Argumentation Techniques during two courses.
A first experience was done by using a blog (WordPress), in which a real case (i.e. strike of air controllers) was simulated. During a first phase, in the blog, the students worked in three groups: the government, customers and the air controllers union. All comments and propositions were written on the blog. The blog was used both for discussion purposes among students and to write the final text of their respective proposals for the further negotiation.
Another experience was done by using a wiki (Wikispaces). This experience used the feature of the wiki to create projects to which students can be allocated. The students then can edit the wiki page of their corresponding group, and where they would write the document that the assignment required. The good thing of the wiki is that the history and the discussion page features that allow the teacher to follow or review the whole process of creation of a specific wiki page.
The grading of the collaborative work was done in two steps: 50% corresponding to the final text, and the same note for every member of the group; and 50% corresponding to the discussion process and different for every individual.
One of the problems of this kind of collaborative work is that it demands a higher level of interaction between students and, thus, even if it is an asynchronous methodology, it is “more synchronous” than a different methodology where anyone can set their own pace of learning.
e-Teaching tools. The use of social networking sites in the subject “Human Rights and democratic values” Isabel Victoria Lucena Cid, Universidad Pablo de Olavide.
The use of social networking sites has been applied to the subject:
To improve the sense of an academic community and to promote collaborative work.
Benefit from the possibilities that offer these tools and introduce them in the learning environment to make the relations among students and among students and teachers more collaborative, more informal, more comfortable especially for the students.
Social networking sites have been used to enrich the syllabus with third parties’ resources that anyone could share, and to discuss and debate on the topics of the subject. In this particular experience, the teacher created a group on Facebook and the students would share videos and news on the “wall” of the Facebook group.
On the other hand, social networking sites themselves became a matter of discussion, as some pages used by the Spanish indignants were analysed during the course.
The students state that this practice helped them in finding and sharing supporting materials for the subject. Also, the exposure of having the debates fully publicly also provided valuable experience to the students, that received plenty of comments, no only from their classmates but also by people not belonging to the course.
The online forum tool phpBB. Initial assessment of the experience at UOC Marc Vilalta Reixach, School of Law and Political Science, UOC.
Main strengths of the phpBB:
A single space can be used for several purposes and multiple discussion threads.
The RSS feed enables subscription and, thus, being noticed without the need to access the forum to check for updates.
Possibility to evaluate the students’ contributions by any user.
The tag-cloud helps to identify the main topics dealt with in the forum.
Possibility to link and embed third parties’ resources inside the forum, which enables the inclusion of further learning material beyond what was initially planned in the syllabus.
The asynchronous nature of the forum (vs. a chat) has helped the students to better support their interventions, but without a sense of interruption within the discussion. The possibility to evaluate the posts or having one’s own posts evaluated has of course been an incentive to work harder on them, as quantitative feedback was immediate and public for everyone.
Discussion
Ignasi Beltran de Heredia: how can one assess +300 tweet or +150 editions on a wiki? Ismael Peña-López, Manuel Vial: it certainly requires a higher degree of implication of the teacher, that now has to follow more closely what is happening in the classroom. Thus, assessment is not done at the end of the course, but almost on a daily basis.
Share:
3rd Conference on Law Education and Information and Communication Technologies (2012)
